Cosmological Applications of Gravitational Lensing

Trustees Of Boston University, Boston

Investigators

Abstract

This research centers around three investigations that will make use of two properties of gravitational lenses: 1) background galaxies are distorted tangentially around foreground galaxies (lenses), and 2) background galaxies are boosted in flux by foreground galaxies. The first study will use an existing wide-field survey to characterize individual galaxy dark halos via galaxy-galaxy lensing. The second will test whether the dark matter profile hypothesized for clusters of galaxies can simultaneously reproduce weak lensing shear and cluster velocity dispersions. The third will investigate the mid-infrared photometric properties of a set of normal star-forming galaxies at redshifts of 0.5-1 that have been strongly amplified by galaxy clusters, focussing on the emission features of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).